Study On Bilingual Middle School Uyghur Students’ Language Use Of Chinese And Uyghur Inside And Outside School In Urumqi

Scholars at home and abroad have done studies on language contact betweenand language use of Uyghur and Chinese and other languages in recent years.However, few studies have been conducted on language use and attitudes of Uyghurstudents from bilingual middle schools in Xinjiang.Bilingual middle schools in Urumqi have set up three teaching models.Differences of these models include instruction language, courses offered, teachingprocess and teaching aims. In order to improve the quality of bilingual teaching,government pointed out that education department should improve the teachingmaterials and the quality of the teaching staff, and strengthen research, teachingguidance and management.The present study aims to investigate Uyghur students’ language use of andattitudes towards Chinese and Uyghur inside and outside school in Urumqi and theinfluencing factors. The research utilized a questionnaire to examine347participantscoming from three bilingual middle schools (No.67, No.58and No.15) andinterviewed15Uyghur students and2teachers. The questionnaire employed in thepresent study takes its shape from the modification of the researches of Thomas&Robert（2011）and Baker (1992). The author adopts SPSS (17.0) software package tomake a statistical analysis (mainly frequency analysis, Person chi-square and linearregression) of the data, and makes a qualitative analysis of the statistical results bytaking into considerations the school and social backgrounds, types of students aswell as bilingual educational policies.The major findings are as follows:1）The proportion of Uyghur students’language use of Chinese, and, Chinese mixed with Uyghur, is higher than Uyghur indaily life (school, home and public places), which is completely different from mostformer studies.2) Three types of bilingual students (MKM, MKH&NCB) havedifferent patterns of language use in different settings.3) Uyghur students havepositive attitudes towards Chinese language and culture, and they realize theimportance of Uyghur-Chinese bilingualism and mastery of Chinese.4) Theinfluencing factors consist of gender, types of students, residential environment,bilingual teaching and education policy. It is also found that the female Uyghurstudents tend to use Chinese, and Chinese mixed with Uyghur, and adapt to bilingualteaching models and Chinese learning easily.The study provides a new example of the research on language use and bilingual education. It is hoped that it can provide reference value to minority language policymaking, bilingual education developing and language planning.